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Los Angeles County and the rest of the country are in a race against time to vaccinate as many people as possible against the coronavirus before a variant considered even more contagious takes hold.
These concerns were highlighted in a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Friday, which said the new modeling indicates that the variant “has the potential to increase the trajectory of the US pandemic in the months to coming, ”the projection showing“ rapid growth in early 2021, becoming the predominant variant in March. “
The new strain, first identified in Britain, weighs heavily on the minds of LA County public health officials as they assess potential new health orders aimed at preventing the spread of the disease.
Parameters that could be further considered include outdoor gymnasiums, which have been allowed to open at 50% capacity, and indoor malls and shops, which are supposed to be open at only 20% capacity, have LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said Thursday night.
Public health director Barbara Ferrer said this week that she too was worried about the variant – which, while not yet officially found in LA County, has already been identified in San Diego and San Bernardino counties.
Ferrer said the CDC is urging public health officials across the country to do whatever is necessary to prevent transmission “so that this variant does not become the most dominant form of the virus that circulates for as long as possible.”
“What we’re really trying to do here is sort of create an opportunity for us to get as many people vaccinated as possible before this variant happens,” Ferrer said. “It means we have to go back to the drawing board and watch everything we do, and really assess how, in a very short period of time, can we have more control over the surge, more ability to slow down. really transmission rates? “
Scientists believe the variant, known as B.1.1.7, is not more likely to be fatal or make people sicker once they get infected. There is also no evidence that the newly developed coronavirus vaccines will not be effective against him.
But since the variant is believed to be more easily transmitted, it is considered particularly dangerous. Health officials have long warned of the cascading effect of the coronavirus: the more people infected, the more people will need to be hospitalized and more people will die.
Current expert projections show that, if left unchecked, the UK variant could dominate locally by March, according to Ferrer.
“Now is our time to try to get the surge under control – before the variant becomes widespread,” she said.
The increase in transmission, warns the latest CDC report, “could threaten depleted health care resources, require prolonged and more rigorous implementation of public health strategies, and increase the percentage of population immunity needed. to fight the pandemic.
“The increased transmissibility of variant B.1.1.7 justifies rigorous implementation of public health strategies to reduce transmission and mitigate the potential impact… save critical time to increase immunization coverage,” the report says. “Modeling data from the CDC shows that universal use and increased compliance with mitigation measures and immunization are essential to dramatically reduce the number of new cases and deaths in the months to come.
While “there is no known difference in clinical outcome” with respect to the variant, the CDC report noted a sobering reality: “A higher rate of transmission will lead to more cases, increasing the number of people in need of clinical care, exacerbating the burden on an already strained health system and leading to more deaths. ”
According to the CDC, it is estimated that the variant first appeared in Britain in September.
At least 38 cases have been identified to date in California, among the highest of any state. At least 22 have been identified in Florida, and cases have also been confirmed in Colorado, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut.
“Absolutely, that’s one of our concerns,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s health and human services secretary, in a briefing Tuesday.
On the one hand, the presence of the variant illustrates why activities outside the home carry a higher risk now than they were months or even weeks ago.
“We fear that if it takes off, if it spreads, we will even see [more] increased transmission from where we are now, ”Ghaly said. “Transmission rates will be much more difficult to contain if we see a more widespread proliferation of this UK or this B.1.1.7 variant.”
The faster the vaccines can get into the arms of Californians, Ghaly added, the less impact the variant will have in California, “but in the short term, [we are] very worried about it.
Ghaly previously characterized the new variant as “a bit stickier than the COVID virus we’ve seen so far.”
In other words, the variant appears to have a much easier time sticking to a human cell so that it can hijack it, start to replicate, and spread throughout the body.
Variant B.1.1.7 accounted for 20% of new infections in south-east England in November.
The cases identified so far in San Bernardino and San Diego counties come from at least 20 different households that do not appear to be particularly linked, with no clear link to overseas travel, said Dr George Rutherford , epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at UC San Francisco.
“All of this would suggest that there is a much wider transmission of this variant than what we are currently detecting,” Rutherford said at a campus town hall meeting last week.
More and more studies have confirmed the early suspicions of some scientists that the variant is a super-spreader, capable of spreading the pandemic and supplanting less transmissible strains of the virus.
Once it is established in the United States – a prospect that experts consider inevitable – to thwart it will require more stringent public health measures than those adopted so far, a more rapid deployment of vaccines and a significantly increased willingness of residents to be vaccinated.
“We are losing the race with the coronavirus – it infects people much faster than we can get the vaccine in people’s arms, and it overcomes our social distancing,” University of Florida biologist Derek Cummings said, an expert in emerging pathogens. “Now there is this variant which will make this race even more difficult.”
No decision has yet been made regarding further restrictions under the LA County Stay-at-Home Order.
“I will support this [the Department of] Public health recommends and our public health professionals recommend, ”Garcetti said Thursday evening.
He said it’s possible that additional closures might not be needed if it looks like the pandemic is stabilizing, “but as it increases, as we saw in December – at a rate like that – absolutely, it is something that we cannot maintain and above all, our hospitals cannot.
Over the past week, most areas of LA County have had at least one day where they reported zero or one available intensive care bed, including central Los Angeles, Antelope Valley, Valley of San Fernando, the San Gabriel Valley, and Southeastern LA County. The Westside reported as few as three available intensive care beds, and the South Bay and Long Beach area reported as few as six.
LA County took another step on Thursday, officially surpassing 13,000 local deaths from COVID-19.
Cumulatively, the county has reported 13,244 deaths and 976,075 cases of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
More than 2,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the county have been reported in the past nine days alone.
Times editor Melissa Healy contributed to this report.
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